{"id":901,"date":"2010-11-02T20:49:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-02T20:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=901"},"modified":"2010-11-02T20:49:09","modified_gmt":"2010-11-02T20:49:09","slug":"updating-my-pc-power-usage-measurements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2010\/11\/02\/updating-my-pc-power-usage-measurements\/","title":{"rendered":"Updating my pc power-usage measurements"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ages ago I blogged about how I used a kill-a-watt gadget to <a href=\"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=21\">measure my PC power usage<\/a>. I was recently motivated to check on the usage of my newer PC. Read the old post, and you&#8217;ll see it was a Dual Core 6600 Intel PC with 2 gig RAM and vista. The bootup power usage was 160 watts.<\/p>\n<p>I have since upgraded, and am typing this on an Intel 8 core i7 chip, running at 2.80GHZ. There is now 8 gigs of RAM running on 64 bit windows 7, rather than vista. The PC has an ATI Radeon HD 5700 video card. The measurement was abse unit only, no monitors.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think the 8 core 5700 combo uses more or less power?<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>The readings are as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On boot-up, after windows has just loaded and no apps are running <strong>133 Watts (less than the old PC)<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>After a while to let everythibng settle down, and stuff liek steam had all been turned off to minimsie network traffic. (I couldnt get the hard disk to totally shut down though)\u00a0<strong> 107 Watts <\/strong><strong>(less than the old PC)<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Running <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gratuitousspacebattles.com\">Gratuitous Space Battles<\/a> with an average battle in a window at 1680 x1050 res, all options set to maximum <strong>143 Watts<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Running <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gratuitousspacebattles.com\">Gratuitous Space Battles<\/a> fullscreen at 1920 x1200 res, all options set to maximum <strong>141 Watts<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Re-compiling the game, using Visual studio, maxxing out all 8 cores, and no doubt some fair amount of disk-thrashing <strong>192 Watts<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What surprises me is that GSB, as a mostly single-threaded single-core game, uses 73% of the power of a maxxed out CPU-thrash. Could all that power really be going on fans and hard drive gubbins? and maybe powering the other chips on the motherboard, the video card etc.<\/p>\n<p>In any event, 132 watts for a PC that is theoretically doing sod all is in some ways a LOT, and other ways nothing. The UK price for power is 11.5p per unit which is 1 killowatt hour. That means my PC, when on, is costing me (132\/1000) * 11.5 = 1.51 pence per hour, or at 10 hours a day 330 days a year, roughly \u00a350, or $75. Peanuts really.<\/p>\n<p>But given that my electricity usage is \u00a339 a month, that rates it as 10% of my power usage. That&#8217;s without the router, printer,scanner or two monitors. Obviously this is only electricity, not heating.<\/p>\n<p>In comparison, assume I boil a kettle 6 times a day, it uses 2000 watts for 2 minutes each time. So thats roughly \u00a316 a year, or 3.4% of my power usage.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect the biggest power usage is the PC and laptops, and everything else just makes up a multitude of tiny power draws around the house. Bah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ages ago I blogged about how I used a kill-a-watt gadget to measure my PC power usage. I was recently motivated to check on the usage of my newer PC. Read the old post, and you&#8217;ll see it was a Dual Core 6600 Intel PC with 2 gig RAM and vista. The bootup power usage<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; Updating my pc power-usage measurements<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2010\/11\/02\/updating-my-pc-power-usage-measurements\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":902,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}